


Love is a Broken Door

by wacomintuos



Category: Prototype (Video Games)
Genre: Alex Mercer breaks a door, Elevators, Gen, except that ONE door, no doors were harmed in the making of this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-22
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-16 15:26:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7273588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wacomintuos/pseuds/wacomintuos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's three months post-BLACKLIGHT, and Alex has broken a door.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love is a Broken Door

Alex Mercer was quickly beginning to realise that without an outbreak to control, he didn't have much of a life to get back to at all. The military was starting to get things as under control as they could, and so it was now out of his hands. After all, he'd just make it all worse. 

And so, what was he to do? He'd taken to visiting Dana in the morgue daily, and in between those times he'd cleaned the safe house to near perfection in a quest to aleviate his boredom. He'd gone back to his charred remains of an apartment only to retrieve a photo of his sister and her friend (what was her name again is she still alive does she know that dana is in a coma would she care) and a large globe of the world that he'd placed gingerly on a table. He wanted nothing to do with it, but… It had belonged to Dana’s brother, perhaps she would want it. It was something, after all. 

He'd gone to Dana’s apartment to get some of her things, but there wasn't much. The place was probably raided in the early days of infection. Now he was lying on one of the couches in the safe house, pretending to sleep. He knew it was all pointless, but it passed the time and made him feel a little more human. Not that he really wanted to be all that human at this point. 

Sighing, Mercer stood up, dusting imaginary lint from his shoulder. He caught sight of himself in a mirror across the room and looked away again quickly. He didn't need to see the face of that bastard again. Mercer changed, became somebody else, and searched the large, tangled web of corpses for who he was this time. 

Douglas Kerr. (he is a chef was a chef at a small resteraunt before all this happened infected by his own soup) The name means nothing to Mercer, it's just that of another body. Letting out a deep breath, Mercer shook his head and opened the front door. It splintered and cracked under the sheer force he used to open it, and he rolled his eyes, reminding himself to be a bit more gentle. “Shit,” he muttered to himself, although nobody would have heard him even if he'd yelled it at the top of his lungs. (do i even have lungs anymore or am i just a waste of biomass) “Have to fix that soon.”

Everyone in their right minds had abandoned their blocks of apartments, fleeing the New York Zone to small quarantine zones; towns converted to faculties dedicated to letting Blackwatch house civilians who seemed to have a natural immunity to the BLACKLIGHT virus- the Mercer virus. He had a vague idea what Blackwatch were doing to the people they had held captive there, and boy did he have an opinion on that. Alex was fully aware that he had been named after himself, which he found ironic because this whole thing wasn't even his fault- but then again it was. But he wasn't Alex Mercer. His existence was a lie. 

For once he decided to go down through the front doors of the building instead of a rooftop escape, and of course the elevator decided to be broken as soon as he stepped in. Like hell was Mercer taking the stairs, so with a bludgeoning hammerfist he punched his way down to the ground floor. 

He knew the militia were on the look for him, but then again, he was officially dead. Not even an indestructible virus could survive a nuclear bomb, right? Wrong. He'd spent a long while in the filthy water decomposed into tiny pieces of biomass before eventually deciding to bring himself back together again. Even now he could feel how cold it was getting, and from a long line of mixed memories- one even dating back to Nagasaki, one that always made him shiver, he could remember that there is always a nuclear winter. Some days Mercer sees ash painting the streets of New York in a sick interpretation of snow, but then he blinks and it is gone. 

Still he kept to the shadows. There was once a time that he would attract as much attention as he could to himself just to spite Blackwatch, call on as many strike teams as he could just to hide from them and taunt them ever further. Codename: ZEUS; a ghost. Mercer was only out for a new door, anyway. He didn't have enough patience to go on a killing spree. 

Eventually Mercer came to a hardware store, one that actually seemed pretty well stocked despite three months of total chaos. Even had some poor unfortunate soul manning the counter, some crazy trying to pretend things were all back to normal. As long as he didn't keep him from his business, Mercer would be fine with his presence. He could help, even.

“Looking for a door,” Mercer said hoarsely, awkwardly as he opened the door (gently this time). He had grown so used to talking only to himself to break the long silences, other than that grunge metal that he'd grown so fond of. The man at the counter was portly, perhaps in his sixties, and a small part of Mercer wondered how he'd survived this long. He didn't care enough to ponder it for long, however. 

“Wha-What kind of door?” The man asked quickly, putting down the newspaper he'd been reading, and from where he stood, Mercer could see that it was dated February 17th, 2008, which would have been about a week before the virus became a major problem (before i released elizabeth greene that was my fault i was so stupid) and then he laid it carefully on his desk. 

“I don't know, front door for an apartment.” Grunted Mercer, picking up a screwdriver and a pack of screws, hastily shoving them into a pocket. It tickled. The man (oskar his name is oskar he is was a friend a neighbour he was my father he was my uncle) nodded quickly, waddling into a back room. Mercer stood waiting uncomfortably for a few minutes before the man (oskar) came back, lugging a huge door almost identical to the one Mercer had broken an hour beforehand. For that, and that alone, Mercer decided he wouldn't snap his neck. 

“How about this, sir?” The man (oskar!!) asked, a warm smile on rosy, aging features. Mercer nodded quickly, taking the door from him and standing it to attention against a wall. He eventually decided to agree with the voices in his head and dub the cheerful old man Oskar, who was apparently a man who was loved by his community in his time, and made it known to all that everyone could feel free to bask in his neighbourly affections. “That'll be sixty dollars,” Oskar added, his accent somewhat Russian if Mercer wasn't wrong. Slightly insulting, however, that he demanded he pay for it. Mercer snarled at him and took the door without handing him over those worthless scraps of paper, refusing to renege on his promise not to leave him in a pool of his own blackening blood. 

The journey back to the safe house was a fairly easy one, and for once in his existence he managed it without getting shot at at least once. Once he remembered how broken the elevator was, Mercer decided to run up the building at an inhuman speed, which of course caught the attention of a group of marines, much to his dismay. He quickly ducked in the rooftop door, his own door still in hand.

Once standing in front of the splintering mess that used to call itself a door, he allowed himself to become Alex Mercer again, dropping the skin of poor Douglas Kerr. He set to work on the repair, ripping the old door from its hinges and screwing in the new. 

Of course the last screw was going to be difficult, Mercer told himself. And even then he hadn't expected to put his fist through the door again in frustration. 

He was going to need yet another door. 

“Fuck.”


End file.
